This collection of essays on the conceptualisation and representation of word and image and their interrelationship in literature and the visual arts is written by scholars both from western academia and India, scholars who are established experts in their field as well as young critics making an early foray in the world of scholarly research. In addition, there is an essay by a practising artist meditating on nature and time through self-portraits. The contributors come from a wide variety of locations: India, Ireland, Australia, Norway, Spain and the United States of America. The scope of the book is large: it encompasses not only the literature and art of Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, it also includes an examination of the art and literature of the Indian sub-continent. The verbal and visual genres examined are manifold: epyllion, comedy, epic, satire, children's fiction, travelogue, painting, sculpture, frontispiece, engraving, miniature, book illustration, cartoon, photograph.
The addition of a number of valuable colour plates accessed from museums as diverse as the National Museum, Delhi, the Vatican Pinacotheca and the Victoria and Albert Museum will add to the reader's pleasure.
Another important feature of this book is its interdisciplinary subject matter. Although interdisciplinarity has transformed literary research, it is, for the most part, confined to the relationship between literature and the social sciences. In comparison, the interrelationship of the arts has been a somewhat neglected domain of exploration. This is somewhat baffling since the ancient rhetoricians like Simonides and Horace and Renaissance theorists like Leon Battista Alberti and Philip Sidney often drew illustrative parallels between poetry, painting and sculpture. The ut picture poesis tradition kept the interaction between the literary and the visual alive in the past. In India, Rabindrananth Tagore, among others, wrote extensively on the relationship between poetry and art in his essays and letters. Moving to our times, we can see that while performance studies has provided a corrective by critically bringing together the written or printed dramatic text and its stage life, literature and the visual arts have not received similar scholarly scrutiny, particularly in India. This book is thus a bold attempt to break down the isolation of the two arts and to make parallelism an exploratory method aimed at a mutually enriching synthesis. Since ideas and tendencies acquire an irreducibly concrete life in artistic representation, examination of the same life in two different art forms deepens our understanding of it as well as of the larger issues and contexts in which the literary and visual texts are embedded.
While this is a collection of scholarly essays, there is enough here to interest the lay reader. A conscious effort has been made to eschew jargon and to make the style as pellucid and accessible as possible without in any way diluting the content. The addition of a number of valuable full-colour plates accessed from museums as diverse as the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, the Vatican Pinacotheca and the Victoria and Albert Museum will add to the reader's pleasure.
S peaking of poetry and painting in the same breath as allied liberal arts is, to the contemporary audience, a truism. However, this was not always the case. As Kristeller argues in his marvellous essay 'The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics', the inclusion of poetry and painting in the scope of the liberal arts was not something that the classical world or the Renaissance did in a systematic way, although there are numerous references to the two disciplines in these periods.'
Plato's remarks on poets and painters are notoriously contradictory. In Ion, the Apology and in Book X of The Republic (c. 370 BC) poetry and painting are dismissed as 'representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances and not realities' (The Republic Book X, 599). Imitation is not seen as something praiseworthy for Plato. Painters and poets are mere craftsmen who presume knowledge of things about which they are profoundly ignorant. In fact, poets compose in a state of mindlessness: 'For not by art do they speak these things, but by divine power....God takes the mind out of these poets, and uses them as his servants..." (lon 533c-535c).
Despite these outspoken criticisms of poetry, in the dialogues Plato continuously uses poetic metaphors and conceits, the cave (The Republic) and the allegory of the charioteer and his horses (Phaedrus) being two of the best-known examples. The poets have to be banished from the Republic not because of their inefficacy but because of the power of their work and the influence they have on the masses. In the Phaedrus (c. 370 BC) the poet is admitted to be an 'inspired madman' (245): "The third type of possession and madness is possession by the Muses, When this seizes upon a gentle and virgin soul it rouses it to inspired expression in lyric and other sorts of poetry...' (Phaedrus 245).
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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